Winter Be My Shield (2 page)

One month later

Sierra turned her face towards the blizzard. Needles of ice stung her skin and blasted tears from her eyes and strands of black hair lashed around her face, stiff as a whipcord with frost. Huddled deep within her stolen fur she forced her way through the drifts, as the wind howled and shrieked in her ears.

‘Spirit of storm defend me …' She muttered the ancient prayer like a mantra and glanced back towards the tents and horse-lines she had left behind. The blizzard was her shield — without it she would never have come this far. She could see for perhaps thirty paces around her, but everything beyond was lost in a swirl of white. The men searching for her would be just as blind, but that was scant comfort. She was as likely to stumble into them as they were to find her.

As she turned back the wind caught her hood and swept it away. Without thinking Sierra snatched for it and the movement snagged her sleeve on the rag-wrapped bracelet around her wrist. It tore the cloth loose from her blistered skin and she bit back a yelp of pain. Her stride faltered and she tripped over her snowshoes and fell, sinking to her waist in the snow.

She bared her teeth to the storm in a wordless growl of frustration. She wanted to shriek and scream out all her rage and fear, to beat her fists against the shifting snow. But she dared not take the risk, not even with the roar of the wind to drown her voice.

Her power pulsed within her, struggling like a beast in a snare. Her fear had riled it; it would fight against her control until the pain and her tight-strung nerves eased and let it settle. The burns around her wrists were throbbing and with a sob of breath Sierra shuffled around until the
wind was at her back. She couldn't afford this time, but unless she did something her power would spill and spark again, drawing the hunters to her with light and noise. Carefully she eased the mittens off and rolled her gloves down over the backs of her hands to expose the smears of dried blood on her skin.

The rags around her wrists were dry and stiff, except for spots of dampness where the blisters had burst. She'd soaked the cloth before she left the tent — it was the only defence she had against the shackles Kell had locked around her wrists — but the water hadn't lasted long.

Blood-red stones gleamed at her through the rags and she sifted a little snow in to cover them. Whether it melted to soothe the burns or froze her hands to numbness she didn't much care. Prying the suppression bands off had taken too long  — she'd had no time to work on the punishment bands as well. If she'd waited any longer Rasten might have found her before she even left the camp.

A distant shout made her freeze like a startled hare and she hastily pulled her mittens back on and clambered to her feet. They couldn't have found her tracks — in a storm like this the snow covered them in moments, but the swirling whiteness played tricks on the eye. One of the men must have seen a shadow and shouted before it melted away. It was sheer bad luck but it would end her brief freedom all the same.

Sierra leaned into the wind and set off again. Her only hope was to put as much distance as possible behind her. By now Rasten knew she was gone and if he grew close enough to sense her …

Kell had been treating his new apprentice gently for fear of crippling her growing power, but all that had ended the moment she stepped out of the tent.
It wouldn't have been much longer before he started the training, anyway,
Sierra told herself. Beneath her fur the hilt of her stolen knife pressed against her belly. If Rasten did find her, she had no intention of being taken alive.

She'd killed a dozen men in her escape — torn them apart with the power that lurked beneath her skin and slipped away in the confusion that followed. She'd stolen enough gear to have a chance of surviving outside in a Ricalani winter  — a white coat that camouflaged her against the snow, boots and snowshoes, gloves, cowl, hat and dagger; all the things Rasten had kept locked up out of her reach, using the winter
as another jailer. She'd found a little food — a meagre pack of emergency rations she'd snatched up from a tent. It wouldn't feed her for long.

Power brushed against her mind like the tickling caress of a feather and Sierra faltered, nearly stumbling again.

Sierra …
The voice came as a whisper. It sounded as though Rasten were standing right beside her and murmuring in her ear.
Sierra, where are you going to go? Don't do this, Little Crow. There's nowhere for you to hide — we found you once, we can do it again.

His voice seemed to echo inside her skull. Sierra screwed her eyelids closed and for a moment she saw a ghostly vision through his eyes. He was sitting on a horse with men ranging ahead of him like a line of beaters as he gazed at a forest half shrouded in blinding snow. The Akharian army was drawing near, but Kell would turn out the entire camp to hunt her down if he could, despite the threat of southern soldiers and mages.

A band of searing heat encircled each of her wrists and with a sob of pain Sierra broke the contact. Her power was rising again and, as it neared the surface, Kell's shackles awoke in a bloom of heat to punish her lapse in control.

Spirit of storm …
With the wind howling in her ears Sierra tried to empty her mind. It was no easy thing while the power leapt and surged within her. For two years the suppression stones had kept it caged and without those bonds it was like a wild beast, snarling and bristling with every surge of pain and fear. She imagined her thoughts whipped away like smoke on the wind, but it was some time before it grew quiet once again. Rasten couldn't have expected her to reply — he must have been trying to frighten her into giving herself away. He was surely growing desperate. If he failed to find her, Kell's rage and frustration would fall on him instead. Kell wouldn't permanently damage his apprentice, but he knew how to inflict enormous suffering while still leaving his victim whole — Rasten knew that better than she did. He'd do anything to find her and avert Kell's rage.

You have no food, no shelter and no one to take you in. You don't even know where you are, Little Crow. Come back and beg Kell for mercy and he'll grant it, I promise. There's no life for you without us, Sierra.

She pushed his words from her mind — he was probably right, but at this point she didn't care if she survived the storm, so long as she died
free of her chains. The Black Sun claimed everyone in the end and it would be a kinder fate than the one Kell had in store for her.

The wind eased, and Sierra glanced up to see dark shapes looming ahead. Trees, their branches sweeping low beneath their burden of ice and snow. Her blind flight had taken her into woodland, where the huddled trees gave some defence against the wind. It was an unwelcome sight — in the shelter of those trees, the snow would hold her tracks longer. Visibility was greater, too, and once inside she would be unable to move quickly amid the powdery drifts.

Sierra had turned away from the woods, aiming to lose herself in the driving snow, when she heard a horse snort behind her. She hurried for a clump of small trees buried beneath a mound of ice and ducked behind them just as a figure on a horse emerged from the swirling snow, skirting along the edge of the forest and heading in her direction.

Hunching down until she was a shapeless white lump against the snow, Sierra shuffled to a denser stand of trees, hoping they would be enough to block the light if she had to resort to her power.

The horse was a Ricalani pony, a small, shaggy beast, and it trotted along in the peculiar shuffling gait the ponies adopted with the willow and rawhide snowshoes buckled around their hooves. The rider, crouched low in the saddle, had his hood thrown back and was looking around keenly as he rode.

Sierra felt her stomach tighten. He was Ricalani, one of her own people. She should have expected it — Rasten would spare no effort in the search and the native-born scouts were the best in the army, trained since childhood for hunting in the snow. Hooded and shrouded in white as she was, a Mesentreian soldier might walk right past her, but a Ricalani would almost certainly spot her here where the snowfall was lighter. She had no choice but to kill him.

Slowly she backed away from the tree that concealed her, moving with care to keep the snowshoes' long tails from digging into the snow. A moment's clumsiness would finish her here.

The rider, still some distance away, turned his head in her direction and Sierra held her breath. He would have been told it was too dangerous to approach her, that once she was spotted he must retreat and report the sighting. She waited for him to turn and ride away but though he slowed the horse momentarily, he nudged it on again, still scanning the
woods around her. With the barest sigh of relief, Sierra ducked back behind a young pine where she pulled off her mittens and her gloves and tucked them into the sash binding her coat. It was too cold for anyone but a mage to leave skin bare for long, but her power would keep frostbite at bay for a few moments. With her heart pounding, Sierra tried not to think about the pain the punishment bands would bring, the searing flash of heat that would come with her rising power.

The horse slowed to a walk as it approached. Sierra pictured the rider peering between the trees, uncertain now that he'd seen anything at all. She heard him rein in and turn the horse, its snowshoes crunching over ice as he moved towards her.

Black Sun forgive me. I wouldn't do this if there was another way.
Sierra closed her eyes and loosed the beast within her.

The snow beneath the snare was churned and scuffed where the hare had struggled, but the dangling thread of wire was empty. Cam jammed his fists against his belt and glared at it in disgust. ‘Son of a bitch.'

One stiff and frozen hare dangled from his pack. Of the six snares he'd visited today, only one had been successful. The first had been buried beneath a snowdrift before it could catch anything and the others had all been raided, by foxes, wolves and, in one case, a leopard — a big one, judging from the tracks it left behind. That couldn't be helped, but
this
one hadn't been broken, nor was the prey dismembered within the noose. The wire had been deliberately untwisted and then left that way, with no attempt to set the snare again and perhaps replace the stolen catch. The prints around it left no doubt. Someone had raided his snare.

‘Black Sun take you, you miserable bastard!' Cam made a careful sweep of the hillsides through the narrow slit of his snow-goggles before he rested his bow against the sapling and crouched down with a muttered curse to undo the snare and recover the wire. He paid more attention to the silence at his back than the frosted steel. The armies gathered to the west were far too close for comfort. Perhaps it was foolish to run a trap-line out here, but they were near enough to starving as it was, and this way he might get at least a little warning when trouble began to head their way.

When he picked up his bow again, Cam scowled at the prints. They were old, with the surface frozen hard and the edges rounded by the wind. It was the first sign of people he'd seen in weeks, apart from his ragged little band. The king's army was perhaps as little as a few dozen miles away. The invaders from the western lands must be drawing near by now, but it had been weeks since he'd heard any word of the coming battles.

After the gut-wrenching weeks following Isidro's capture, Cam had barely given a thought to the brewing war. His mad, desperate scheme to ambush the guards taking Isidro south for his execution and then the days huddled by his brother's bedside as he hovered near death had become Cam's sole focus. It was only now that Isidro was past the worst and growing stronger that the greater threat snapped into sharp focus and Cam realised how much time had passed and how much the threat to the west must have grown while he was unaware.

No honourable man would raid another's snare, but there was more at stake than the matter of a stolen kill. Anyone desperate enough to steal so brazenly was a threat. It might be a deserter or another bandit kicked out of Charzic's band, or a foraging party from the king's camp. By the Black Sun, it might even be an Akharian scout, searching for a way past the king's forces. Either way, he had to know. Keeping his camp safe and undiscovered was of the highest importance. His tiny band ought to move on from these hills as soon as possible, but for the moment Isidro was still too weak to be subjected to the hardships of winter travel.

Cam followed the tracks away from the snare and around the thicket, where he found another surprise. The thief had tethered a horse there while he stole the kill — another worrying sign. The common folk of Ricalan rarely bothered with horses. Those who could afford a beast of burden preferred the
yaka
, which provided milk and fleece as well as strength for hauling and were hardier even than the native ponies; but most folk simply did without, packing their gear on a toboggan and hauling it themselves. Here in the north, only three sorts of folk kept horses — the ruling clans, the army and the Raiders who lived in the no-man's-land between the settlers and the native folk. Having Charzic and his men find them would be just as bad as if the Mesentreians did, but Cam had seen no sign of them since Isidro was taken. They'd heard the talk of war as well and he suspected they'd retreated to the east, where the villages wouldn't be full of soldiers itching for a fight.

But there was only the one set of prints: if the thief was alone it would be a simple matter to deal with. Once his pack was settled on his shoulders again, Cam set out to follow him.

The trail was perhaps a day old, but it led him back towards his own camp. The horse had been moving slowly, meandering really, as though the rider had dozed in the saddle and woken only when the horse
stopped to graze. Cam relaxed a little as the tracks grew steadily more erratic. If the thief was that far gone with hypothermia, chances were that he wouldn't be a threat to anyone by now.

Every mile or so, Cam stopped to search for signs of pursuit. If the thief were a deserter, surely someone would come searching for him — unless the battle was already met and the king's men were too hard-pressed to worry about such losses.

There was no sign of other men, but as the sun passed its zenith an odd noise reached his ears. It was a low rumble like distant thunder, but the sky was clear, with only a few high mare's-tail clouds drawn out by the wind.

Cam veered from the track and ducked into a patch of cover. He'd heard something like that before, only the last time it had been far more distant, carried in snatches by the wind. The rumble died out after only a short time, but with his heart pounding in his throat, Cam scrambled up a nearby ridge to see if he could spot the source of it. The noise had seemed to come from the west, but it was hard to tell with the echoes rolling around the hills.

The last time he'd heard a sound like thunder out of a clear sky, he and Isidro had been watching Kell and his apprentice tear apart the fortress of a clan that had defied the king. From their vantage point on an overlooking mountain, they'd seen unearthly swathes of blood-red light and seething flame crawl over the ancient stone and consume it, with the sound reaching far further than any mere storm. By morning there had been nothing left but a blackened scar.

By the time he reached the ridge the noise had stopped. Cam searched the horizon, but there were no flickering lights or blood-red gleam — and in the low winter daylight, surely he would see the lights if they were there …

After a long moment he spotted a haze of ice forming a low cloud beyond hilltops to the north and breathed a heavy sigh of relief. It was only an avalanche, not mages doing battle in these hills after all. Of course, for all he knew Lord Kell and the Akharian mages were already squaring off to the west — with these steep hills to break up the sound he might not hear it until it was too late.

This war had been brewing for decades. The first Mesentreian settlers had come to Ricalan nearly a century before in the early days of the alliance with the southern isles, boatloads of starving and land-hungry
people from the overcrowded islands. By the time Cam's elder brother Severian took the throne, the Mesentreians controlled the south of Ricalan, providing safe harbours for ships to strike at the Akharian Empire. They seized Akharian grain ships, their mundane cargo worth a fortune in Mesentreia, and landed to raid and burn Akharian farms. The empire lacked Mesentreia's mastery of the sea, and even their military mages could do little to stem the piracy or turn back the swift-striking raiders who plied their vast coast.

Even here in the north, Cam had heard tales of riots in the south over the price of grain. A bad harvest in the empire seemed to have been the final straw. The legions marched north, crossing the frozen fens that marked Ricalan's western border and aiming for the harbours to the south. Severian had brought his army and his sorcerer north to meet them at the boundary between the settlements and the tribal lands. But the king's goal was to protect the southern holdings — he would sacrifice no men to defend the tribal north and the clans who only tolerated his rule for fear of the sorcerer he commanded. The Akharians were slavers and Cam knew Severian would count it a favour if they thinned the ranks of those who despised their foreign king.

Cam had hoped he and his people would be gone from here by the time this came to a head, but he was afraid it was already too late for that. Somehow, he had to find a balance between giving Isidro time to heal and herding his little band out of here before the soldiers — any soldiers — found their camp and slaughtered them all. With one last sweep of the horizon, Cam slipped and skidded back down the slope to collect his pack and pick up the trail once again.

He spotted the horse as the sun was sinking. It was tethered in a stand of trees where it had scraped the snow away with its hooves, searching vainly for any grazing buried beneath. Cam set his pack down and took out his white war-coat, wrapped in a bit of oilcloth to protect it from blood and stains. The effort of walking had made him warm enough to shed his heavy fur in favour of a windproof buckskin parka and trousers. He pulled the white leather coat over it, buckled his quiver at his hip and nocked an arrow to his bow, then circled around to approach the copse from the other side.

The surface of the snow was smooth and unbroken apart from the tracks of small animals and the mark of an owl's wings, where it
had swooped on some small creature beneath the snow. A tethered and unguarded horse would be fine bait for an ambush, but if there was anyone hiding in wait the snow would have betrayed them. Cam approached slowly, placing each foot with care to lessen the noise of his snowshoes. With shallow breaths he tasted the air, but all he could smell was stale smoke and the sharp scent of snow.

He was perhaps a dozen paces away when the horse finally noticed him. It threw its head up with a nicker of fright and jerked back on the tether.

‘Whoa, lad,' Cam said, softly. ‘Easy there. What's happened to your master, then?'

His voice soothed it and when he came close enough to rub its nose the beast lipped at his sleeve. ‘Hungry, aren't you?' Cam said.

The horse was tethered beside a large spruce, its lower branches bowed down by the weight of ice. There was usually a space beneath the lowest boughs and in an emergency it made a good shelter, insulated by the airy bulk of the snow. Cam could see a place where the snow had been trampled and the branches pushed aside, but there was no sound or movement from inside.

The horse seized his sleeve in its teeth and Cam grabbed its nose to make it let go. ‘Hello, the camp!' he called. ‘Anyone in there?'

No response. The air was cold, with no hint of warmth from a fire, and the only sound was the moaning of the wind through the needles of the trees.

Cam took the arrow from his bowstring and returned it to his quiver. He sunk the end of the stave into the snow and crouched at the entrance, reaching inside his war-coat for his knife.

The thief had wedged the saddle into the entrance he'd created; as Cam shoved it aside, the disturbance sent a cascade of snow over his back. He ignored it and leaned into the gloom.

The ashes of a cold fire rested atop a platform of green twigs. The bones of his hare lay beside them, picked clean and heaped in a haphazard pile.
You poor sod,
Cam thought. Fresh hare was as tough as old boot leather. It had to hang for a few days in a warm tent to be considered edible.

The thief was curled up beyond the cold ashes, so bundled up in wool and fur that only his eyes were visible, peacefully closed as his head lolled
against the trunk. Frost spangled the cowl that was pulled up over his mouth and nose and glittered on his eyelashes and finely arched brows.

Cam crawled into the narrow space and pulled the cowl down with a flick of his fingers. Not a man after all, but a woman, scarcely more than a girl, and of Ricalani blood too. This was no deserter. ‘Hey,' he said, and shook her gently. ‘Hey, can you hear me? Wake up!'

Her head slumped forward onto her chest, but she didn't stir. Her lips were blue with cold, but at least she wasn't frozen solid.

‘Bright Sun, help me!' Cam pulled off his mitten and the glove beneath and held them in his teeth as he felt for a pulse in her neck. Her skin was so cold that his heart sank, but there was a rule for those who fell prey to the cold —
no one's dead until they're warm and dead.
He'd seen children pulled stiff and lifeless from beneath the ice, only to be running and playing with their siblings the next day.

‘Come on,' Cam said, shifting his fingers to try again. His heart was beating harder and all he could think of was Isidro, deathly white and lying on a slab of river ice with water freezing in his hair.

They'd ambushed the caravan taking Isidro to Lathayan for his execution, but the man driving the sled had been determined not to let his prisoner be rescued. With an arrow in his back he'd driven the sled and its heavy bronze cage onto ice too thin to hold its weight. Chained and helpless, Isidro had been held under the black water for an age before they'd managed to cut through the wagon gate and pull him free, moments before the sled crashed all the way through and sank beneath the ice, dragging the screaming horses with it. Rhia had brought him back, but only just, and pneumonia still rattled and burned in his chest almost a month later.

A flutter beneath Cam's fingers brought him back to the present. Her blue-tinged lips parted and when Cam heard the faint whisper of her breath he wanted to laugh with relief. ‘Ha! Well, my little thief, you'll answer for my hare after all!'

 

There was a tickle in his throat. Isidro tried to keep his breathing shallow to avoid another bout of coughing, but he knew he was fighting a losing battle with the dry winter air.

The sun had set and deep blue shadows were spreading over the snow. An owl called from somewhere among the scattered trees. He had been
standing here long enough for a cloud of mist to gather around him, a haze of ice crystallised from the moisture in his breath.

Rhia came to stand at his side. ‘Isidro, you should come in out of the cold.'

‘In a moment,' he said. His voice was hoarse and rusty. Rhia said it was just the pneumonia, but he wasn't so sure. Many things had been damaged beyond repair during his time in Kell's tent.

He felt her eyes upon him and tried not to show his irritation. Most southerners were small but Rhia was slight even for them, due to the years she had spent as a slave. Only a fool mistook her stature for weakness, though — he'd seen her pull arrows and spears from struggling warriors and set enough broken or dislocated limbs to be sure of that. She'd been born in the empire, but had spent half her life in Mesentreia after being captured on a raid and then given in payment to a physician, who taught her his craft.